There are labs you can just order stuff from. I.e. I gave myself full bloodwork done at Synlab as a present for my 35 birthday, and they had covid antibody-levels test available as well.
I was lucky that I could use some corporate benefit for that, but even out of pocket it would be 30-50 Eur? And most things were within baseline, and things that weren't were close enough (I.e. I don't feel like stressing about cholesterol just yet), but I like I have a baseline to refer to.
If the PHD was the thing you could hyperfocus on, because reasons ... you could still fight with i.e. paying your utilities late because ADHD made it that you just didn't and then there was a pile of stuff and you didn't want to deal with that pile even more ... I am on meds for last 6 months and the feeling of "oh, I can just make myself do things, no big deal" for the first week of medication was wonderful. Honeyoon period is now over, but it is still nice...
Like, I turned to psychiatric help, because in that year before I got medication I didn't do anything at work ... didn't click with a new team, I think. I have ~successfully worked as a dev for 10 years and have masters in computer science. Was lucky. I realised this was probably first year I was working on a thing I didn't care about. But afterwards I had many realisations like "normal people don't account for late-fees in their budget, they just pay on time" ...
I.d.k. I write like that :D Maybe I miss not being to uhm, and ehm and have pauses when I am thinking in my writing, so I use dots ... kinda silly, if I think about it, but not a thing I would spend energy to not do?
Yeah, from what I know of people with ADHD, this doesn't sound like ADHD person on amphetamines ... well, unless one of the things that ADHD caused them is being a people pleaser due to rejection sensitivity and I did hear that medication can help a lot with this - like it does help with doing things you have aversion to, so if you only were nice to other people because "what if they don't like me otherwise", you could now feel liberated to be the uncaring self-centered bastard ...
But getting the dose is tricky, talking to them about better drugs could help.
If you are affraid of addiction ... yeah, some behaviors can look like that, and there can certain degree of physiological dependence ... but "I am anxious my meds that help me function better will run out, with shortage and prescription hoops" and "damnit, I forgot to take my meds in the morning and now it is too late and I am angry, because I can basically write-off the rest of the day" is fairly standard medicated ADHD experience :-)
I know some people that are fairly skeptical of CBT, but this is probably because it was oversold to them as the cure, and in the end the attempt to use it lead to something that sounded like masking-induced anxiety rather than actual solution to problems.
On the other hand, I know people who did some sort CBT and it seems to have genuinely helped them, especially with helping forming better habits?
Damn, one day, when it is available somewhere near me ... right now only people in my country that know Vyvanse (or Elvanse) are foreigners lamenting absence of the one drug that makes them function.
If you have a psychiatrist, do talk to them about that.
It might be the case that you have enough systems and mitigations set-up in life that really only the parts that feel like superpower remain. Some part of that could be some degree of self-medication, i.e. I assume that many people that live on coffee, nicotine and spite do in fact have undiagnosed ADHD and switching coffee to some sort of modern amphetamine prescription would improve quality of their life.
I did get medicated fairly recently. Spent a year really flailing at work, in a way that was not usual for me, but I got to a team with little structure and deadlines, with a team-lead where we often didn't understand each other but not to a degree he would care?
I figured I hav adhd-like symptoms (the innatentive-kind) for most of my life and that I might be at a point I actually need help, took me several months to find a psychiatrist, she agreed that I fit the diagnosis, and in my country I basically had the choice between Strattera, Ritalin and Concerta. Tried Ritalin in mornings for two months and wow, for that time, 4 hours every day I could do stuff ... piles of invoices I have usually been avoiding for weeks disapeared. For the first time in my life I had the experience of actually finishing some work I thought was completely pointless. But I didn't like that after lunch I literally needed to lie down for ~hour.
Changed to Concerta, which is ~slow release version of Ritalin, effect is not that big, but still noticeable, I am capable of creating piles of invoices on Concerta, but when I take it I don't scroll on tiktok for 15 minutes before I gear up to get out of the car and go to office and instead I can just ... go work, and I like that.
